Environmentalist Bill McKibben on CBC's The Current talks about being exhilarated by the rapid change to renewable energy and away from fossil fuels
Sid Shniad
BILL MCKIBBEN: It's not that we're going to stop global warming. It's too late for that. It's that we have a chance to reboot the way the world and its economy and its geopolitics works right now.
MG: Bill McKibben was one of the first environmentalists to alert the world to the threat of climate change. Now, 36 years later, the remarkable growth of solar energy fills him with hope. Bill McKibben is here to talk about why he thinks solar energy could save civilization. He'll make that pitch coming up in six minutes. I'm Matt Galloway. You're listening to The Current on CBC Radio and the CBC Listen app. Stay with us.
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BILL MCKIBBEN
Guest: Bill McKibben
MG: Hello, I'm Matt Galloway, and you're listening to The Current. For decades, Bill McKibben has been warning the world about the risks of climate change. Those warnings have often been very stark, but his latest book is surprisingly hopeful. It's called “Here Comes the Sun”, and it documents the remarkable growth of solar power around the world. Bill McKibben joins me now in our Toronto studio. Good morning.
BILL MCKIBBEN: Good to be with you, Matt.
MG: Really nice to see you. You write in the book, it is definitely too late to stop global warming. But you also say that for the first time, you can see a path out of the climate crisis. What is that path?
BILL MCKIBBEN: So, you know, I wrote the first book about what we now call the climate crisis, what we then called the greenhouse effect back in the 1980s. And that entire time, I mean, those predictions are sadly coming true and true all the time. We finally have a tool, a scalable tool, cheap, clean energy from the sun and the wind and the batteries to store them when the sun goes down and the wind drops. That's the first chance we've had. It is too late to stop global warming. It's not too late perhaps to start shaving tenths of a degree off how hot the planet gets. And every 10th of a degree that we warm, this Earth moves another 100 million people from a safe climate zone to a dangerous one. So this is, if not a hopeful moment, then at least a moment of possibility for the first time.
MG: You say that the opportunity presented makes you giddy. That's an interesting word.
BILL MCKIBBEN: The planet's generating a third more energy from the sun this autumn than we were last autumn. The speed with which this is suddenly happening, and this is a story of the last 36 months, is pretty remarkable. There's never been an energy transition like it in the past for the speed with which it's happening. We don't see that so much here because it's centred, though it's global, it's definitely centred in China, but the speed with which it's happening in China is pretty jaw dropping. In May, the Chinese were putting up three gigawatts of solar panels a day. And gigawatts, the rough equivalent of a large coal fired power plant. So they were putting up one of those out of solar panels every eight hours.
MG: That's, when you think about the numbers, I mean, it's remarkable.
BILL MCKIBBEN: Yeah. In California, which is the one part of the States that took this semi-seriously, they hit some kind of tipping point 18 months ago. Most days now, California generates more than 100% of its electricity from renewable sources for long stretches. At night, when the sun goes down, the biggest source of supply to the grid in California are the batteries that have been soaking up excess sunshine all afternoon. Or look at Australia, which, you know, roughly comparable to Canada in the size of its population, in its position on the planet and so on, there are now so much solar energy in Australia that two weeks ago, the federal government announced that starting January 1st, all Australians will get three free hours of electricity every afternoon. 12 to 3, free electricity. Charge your EV, run your washer, fill up your storage battery with free electricity so you can run your house all night. Humans have spent 700,000 years since we lit the first campfire working pretty hard to get the energy that we need for our lives. All of a sudden, in our decade, the possibility that we'll have it in abundance almost for free.
MG: How did we get to this point? Because for a long time, as you said in the book, Solar and Wind were kind of looked at as like the Whole Foods of power supply. Nice but pricey.
BILL MCKIBBEN: Now they're the Costco of energy. Cheap, available in bulk, on the shelf, ready to go. We got there with a combination of activism and engineering. So think about the solar cell invented in 1954, Bell Labs, Edison, New Jersey. At the time, the most expensive energy that the world had ever seen. The only thing you could use it for was satellites because there was no choice. But over time, engineers began to iterate, and they were driven by activism. And right around the turn of the century, the German Green Party held the balance of power in their parliamentary system, and so they exacted the price of what they called the energy vendor, an expensive feed-in tariff for people who'd put solar panels on their roof. The government was paying a pretty heavy subsidy, and that subsidy was enough to get the Chinese working hard to figure out how to meet the demand. That's when this downward spiral in price really kicked off. And about five years ago, we went past some invisible line where it became cheaper to generate power from the sun and the wind than from burning coal or gas or oil.
MG: If that's the case, why aren't we doing it then? I mean, China is and other jurisdictions are, but why aren't we seeing this at the scale that you might expect?
BILL MCKIBBEN: Two and two reasons, really. Vested interest and inertia. And both of those are powerful forces in human affairs.
MG: Talk about them both, vested interest in particular.
BILL MCKIBBEN: So look at my country. Last year, Donald Trump, running for president, had a not very secret meeting with the oil industry in which he said, if you give me a million, a billion dollars in campaign donations, then you can, I'll give you anything you want. They ended up between donations and advertising and lobbying, putting about half a billion into the election cycle last time, and that was plenty. Donald Trump has shut down work on wind farms that were 80% complete off the coast of New England. A few weeks ago, he put the kibosh on what would have been the biggest solar farm in America, one in Nevada big enough to power two million homes. That must be, you know, much of Toronto. You know, a solar farm big enough to do that, but we don't get it now. So the US, and as we saw in Belém this week, the Brazilian climate talks…
MG: At COP.
BILL MCKIBBEN: Yeah, the Saudis and the Russians are rolling hard to try and slow down this transition. They can't stop it. 40 years from now, we're going to run the planet on sun and wind because of sheer economics.
MG: You make that statement in the book. You believe that in 40 years, we will, the planet will be fueled by sun and wind.
BILL MCKIBBEN: I think mostly. But, but, and this is the crucial but, if it takes us anything like 40 years to get there, then the planet we run on sun and wind will be a broken planet. There was a study yesterday that came out based on research being done up in northern BC. And what they were finding were these, what they called zombie wildfires, that were burning all winter long in the permafrost, what used to be the permafrost.
MG: The pit and what have you. Yeah.
BILL MCKIBBEN: Yeah, you know, and then reigniting the boreal forest in the spring when they came up. The Gulf Stream, the big currents of the Atlantic are now flickering and faltering as freshwater pours off a melting Greenland. The news from the Antarctic is worse with every iteration. The jet stream, which depends on the temperature differential between the pole and the equator, is clearly now wobbling, gone funky with strange weather on either side. We're in absolutely perilous shape. We have very little time to do it. We finally have a tool, and so not using it all out right now would be an extraordinary act of folly. It is vested interest, and it is also some inertia. You know, it's going to take some work. Everybody has a furnace in their basement that needs to become an electric heat pump. There's a car in the garage that needs to become an EV or an e-bike.
MG: Is it going to take sacrifice? I want to ask you about e-bikes as well, because that's a point that you make. Is it going to take sacrifice as well? One of the things that you say in this book, again, provocative, is that we can be done with combustion, that we can put combustion, burning things on the back burner.
BILL MCKIBBEN: Yes.
MG: We rely on burning things for a lot of things, including how we get around in some ways, how we live the way that we operate. What are we going to have to do without if solar and wind are going to be the things that are going to drive this planet?
BILL MCKIBBEN: I drive an EV. It's better than the car I used to have. It runs off the solar panels on my roof. I heat the house with an electric heat pump that runs off the solar panels on the roof. It's quieter and more efficient than the furnace I used to have. I'm the cook in our family. I use an induction cooktop instead of open fire in the kitchen. Not only does it boil water faster, but your kids have 50% less chance of getting asthma. These things are not huge sacrifices.
MG: What about things like air travel?
BILL MCKIBBEN: Air travel is very hard. Intercontinental anyway. That's about 3% of emissions. The real sacrifice is for oil companies. They have trillions of dollars of theoretical wealth in the ground right now that they will have to forgo. But in return, the world gets this energy source that's available to everyone everywhere, and with it, potentially an extraordinary lessening of tension. Think about what the geopolitics of the world would have looked like for the last 100 years if oil had been of relatively trivial value all that time, how many wars and coups and terrorist plots and assassinations we would have avoided. Think about the 80% of human beings who live in countries that have to import fossil fuel. When we hear about poor countries having balance of payments crises and things, that generally means they can't afford the next shipment of oil that's, you know, swinging at anchor out in the harbour.
MG: You mentioned e-bikes, and you say in the book that e-bikes are an important invention.
BILL MCKIBBEN: Around the world probably, e-bikes, we’re selling more e-bikes now than EVs because they're cheap, but they're also pretty miraculous if you think about it. I mean, a bicycle is elegant technology, to begin with. Now we have a bicycle with no hills. I mean, that's a, I mean, we're not going to get much more magic than that. And you go about five miles on a penny's worth of electricity. You know, that's about as good as it's going to get, I think.
MG: And you think that this could be a solution for transport in some urban centres around the world.
BILL MCKIBBEN: Look at what's happening in, say, Paris. Transformed over the last five years. The city of light is now the, also the city of bicycles.
MG: By removing cars from, in many ways, the centre of the city.
BILL MCKIBBEN: Yes. And by all accounts, Parisians love it. It's made a city that's endlessly nicer to be in.
MG: You mentioned Belém, and that was the site of the UN climate conference. That conference ended with a final agreement that says nothing about transitioning off fossil fuels. Apparently, the words were in there and then were stripped out after protests from various members who were there. What do you take from that?
BILL MCKIBBEN: I think that probably the future of the climate fight is going to be decided less in these international venues than it is in sheer economic decision making in one country.
MG: Do you think these UN conferences do much of anything? I mean, it gets people together, but…
BILL MCKIBBEN: I think they played a very important role up through Paris. I think Paris 10 years ago marked the sort of high watermark of them. It was a crucially important agreement if for no other reason than it suddenly elevated this 1.5 degree temperature goal. And that in turn made people realize how immediate the problem was. So it changed the dynamic. At this point, I mean, the most interesting thing about climate negotiations in the years to come will be watching how China decides to supplant the US. In international terms, just to be clear, my country over the last nine months has seeded the economic and technological future to China, and with it probably a kind of political primacy on the planet as well. I don't think there's ever been a series of own goals like that in geopolitical history. America's trying to hang on for the last dollars out of the 18th century technology that we've depended on, and what a mistake.
MG: Can I go back just to Brazil? I mean, one of the things we talked about on this program around the climate conference was the fact that as that conference was happening, there were groups and people maybe affiliated with that industry, but also people who work for that industry, people who would benefit from that industry, who are also developing oil and gas reserves in Brazil at the same time as that was happening. And they said they needed this because this will help spur the economy, lift them out of poverty. It will provide enormous benefits to those communities.
BILL MCKIBBEN: The old set of arguments, but those set of arguments are being upended, and probably with real impact on the economies of places like Canada and the US. So let me give you an example, and it's a really interesting one. Pakistan is probably the country that's been hit hardest by climate change on this earth. Two floods in the last 15 years, 2010 and 2022, that were the biggest since Noah. Summertime heat now routinely in the 120s in their urban areas. Their one geographic advantage, a long border with China, across which over the last 18 months, unbelievable numbers of these cheap Chinese solar panels have come. Not imported by the government, imported by individual Pakistanis who are tired of an expensive and unreliable electric grid and want their own power. Pakistani farmers were early adopters. They're using 35% less diesel this year than last year. But here's the real bottom line and worth thinking about for Canada as it thinks about the future. There's now so much solar power in Pakistan that the government last week, they had a commitment to buy many, many, many tanker loads of liquefied natural gas from Qatar. The government said, we don't need it anymore. We're producing so much solar power. We're going to pay you a penalty not to ship that natural gas to us because we don't have any way to use it. We're making our power from the sun. That's now starting to happen across much of Africa. The last six months have seen, along any of the Chinese trade routes, a huge surge. This is the future. I'll tell you another story. China last month, more than half the cars sold in China last month came with the plug hanging out the back. I haven't been to China in the last year or two, but I've talked with friends in Beijing and Shanghai. Not only is the air infinitely clearer than it was a few years ago. They said the cities are also much, much quieter than they were just a year ago because so many of the cars were electric. This was the demand that the US and Canada were counting on, countries like Pakistan buying lots of LNG, Chinese motorists buying lots of gas. You know, that's not going to happen. And, you know, so, so one should be probably careful about making long term infrastructure plans that depend on a market that looks like it will not exist.
MG: What do you make of what Mark Carney, the Prime Minister, has been doing? There's an announcement that will come later this week around the framework for a new oil pipeline that will, if, if it's ever built, would ship oil from Alberta to the BC coast. He's somebody who was the UN climate envoy. He wrote a book called “Values”, which was about the, as he called it, the tragedy of the horizon, that politics will imperil the fight against climate change because people think in a four-year election cycle. What do you make of…
BILL MCKIBBEN: He gave one of the most important talks about climate at Lloyd's of London more than a decade ago when he really underscored the fine, what's now starting to happen in lots of ways. Look, let me say two things. One is I'm an American, and I'm very active in the fight to try and somehow preserve democracy in America. The Third Act, this group I set up, you know, we're mobilizing huge demonstrations. You have no idea how bad it is in America in a lot of ways. Our president called for the execution of six senators and congressmen this week. And so one gives Mark Carney a huge amount, I think, of leeway, understanding that he's one of the people trying to hold the line against an authoritarianism that's encroaching around the planet. And I don't know enough about Canadian politics to know what he has to do to try and hold this country together in the face of separatist threats in the oil patch and so on and so forth. I'll just say I don't think any rational private actor is going to show up to build pipelines out of Alberta, because I don't think anybody really can put together a spreadsheet that shows, I mean, these things are built for 40 and 50-year futures. I don't think there's any 40 or 50-year future where there's that demand for that product.
MG: Folks in that industry have said it's a chicken and egg, that the restrictions are in place which would not allow the money to float. If you take those restrictions away, maybe the money comes in and what have you.
BILL MCKIBBEN: Yeah, Pakistani, Pakistanis are not going to go back. They're not going to turn off their solar panels. They're providing cheap, cheap power. To the extent that we're going to keep using oil and gas for a while in this transition, you can get oil and gas out of the ground in other parts of the world for $10 a barrel. You don't have to ship them over one of the world's highest mountain ranges in order to get them to the coast. I understand that it's hard to face those kind of realities, but I think those probably are the realities. And I think considered globally, this is good news, and I think in the larger sense, good news for Canada too. If we don't manage to get off fossil fuel fast, then the future, especially for Canada with its exposure to the fastest rising temperatures in the world in the Arctic, is very, very grim.
MG: We're out of time. Let me just ask you this. You end the book by saying that you're exhilarated by the possibility. We have, in your words, we've been given one last chance. Do you think, knowing what you know about us, do you think we will, we will grab that last chance?
BILL MCKIBBEN: I have, despite, despite…
MG: Evidence to the contrary.
BILL MCKIBBEN: Despite concerns by decades of evidence to the contrary, I have hope in, you know, the, I have hope in the big brain. Global warming has always been a test of whether the big brain was a good idea, a good adaptation or not. Can get us in a lot of trouble. Maybe it can get us out. Probably the real question is how big is the heart that that brain is connected to?
MG: It's great to see you, Bill McKibben. Thank you very much.
BILL MCKIBBEN: Very good to see you.
MG: Bill McKibben. His new book is called “Here Comes the Sun.”
[Song: “Here Comes the Sun” by The Beatles]
MG: George Harrison knew. Coming up after your regional update.